Just a couple of months after the latest in his 12-volume Ava Lee crime fiction series appeared, Ian Hamilton’s prequel series kicks off with the origin story of Ava’s mentor, Uncle.

The Goddess of Yantai ended with a nod toward at least one future Ava Lee novel, but Canadian ex-journalist Hamilton has also lined up three Uncle entries, beginning with Fate, to be followed in 2020 by Foresight, and in 2021 by Fortune.

FATE by Ian Hamilton (House of Anansi, Spiderline, $19.95)

Uncle is Chow Tung, the Chinese triad leader who, in his 21st-century old age, instructed and protected Ava, the chic, bold, lesbian forensic accountant from Toronto who starred in Hamilton’s original series.

As it turns out, he is even more interesting than his protegee. While Ava Lee maintains dual Canadian and Asian identities and interests, he is firmly rooted in China, going back, in Fate, to his harrowing 1959 escape at 25 from the mainland to Hong Kong.

The Mao-directed agrarian reform that caused the starvation deaths of millions also wiped out every member of Uncle’s family. And so, in desperation and despair, the young Chow Tung joined with a group of others, including his fiancee, in a desperate middle-of-the-night, four-kilometre swim through fetid waters to the far edge of Hong Kong.

Not everyone survived the swim. But Chow did, and in the absence of family, created one for himself by joining the triad running the Hong Kong district of Fanling. Within that tight, disciplined organization, he rose in the ranks until in 1969 — the year of the events of Fate — he is the gang’s assistant White Paper Fan, responsible for managing the money and devising legal and business strategies.

His ideas for modernizing the triad’s businesses have already included reforming its gambling activities. Now he wants to go further, cutting out a protection racket that is increasingly upsetting local businesspeople and instead establishing markets in which the triad would control both booth rentals and the counterfeit goods being sold.

New ideas are a tough sell among older triad executives who do well enough under the old, rough ways, but Uncle cautiously tries to build support with a few allies, while facing down his opponents.

None of this might be much more interesting than the internal machinations of any sizeable corporation, except for a major disruption. The Dragon Head — the leader — of the Fanling triad suddenly dies, and Uncle considers his deputy, who would ordinarily automatically take over, too weak for the job.

Breaking from tradition, he starts campaigning for another triad member to win the leadership. Then come rumours that larger triads in the region are considering moves on the increasingly prosperous Fanling one, and reports of possible treacheries and betrayals float to the surface.

So does the possibility that at least one and maybe two deaths were actually murders, as the risks to Uncle, his proposals, and his life itself, build radically.

Through it all, Uncle remains fundamentally a lonely man who takes care to honour old griefs. But if, as a refugee from mainland Maoism, he has made the triad his family, he is tough and shrewd in defying aspects of it in the interests of change.

It’s hard to know if the author comes close to a reasonable depiction of the triad world, or if he’s dog-paddling in cultural and political waters he can’t genuinely expect to infiltrate. Of course, his previous depictions of a Chinese-Canadian lesbian forensic accountant were a stretch, too.

In any event, he’s a lively writer with an attentive eye for the details of complicated suspense, and the intriguing Uncle, long before he appears in Ava Lee’s life, shows himself to be a man keenly tuned to the shiftings and plottings of his own versions of highly organized crime.